Wealth & Money Quote by John Leonard

Leonard’s line is a neat little shiv aimed at a very American superstition: that wealth is a personal quality rather than a financial instrument. It riffs on the old Fitzgerald-era quip about the rich being “different,” then flips the romance into bookkeeping. The punch isn’t that rich people have more money; it’s that they have more permission. Credit is social trust converted into leverage. It’s the ability to turn tomorrow into today, to borrow comfort, security, even failure, at lower interest than everyone else pays.

The intent is quietly radical: to demystify class without turning it into a sermon. By choosing “credit,” Leonard drags the conversation out of mansions and into contracts, banks, and reputations. The subtext is that inequality isn’t only a gap in possessions; it’s a gap in options. When you have credit, you can smooth over mistakes, buy time, survive a bad month, fund a pivot, lawyer up, move neighborhoods. When you don’t, every setback is immediate, cash-only, and punitive.

Contextually, mid-1960s America is a perfect staging ground for this observation: mass consumer credit is expanding, advertising is selling aspiration on installment plans, and the country is congratulating itself on prosperity while building new mechanisms of exclusion. Leonard, as a poet, lands the critique with compression and sting. He doesn’t argue; he re-labels the rich. Not nobility, not villains, not even “fortunate” people. Just the ones the system already believes in.